


it can't be helped

by jasminemelt



Category: No. 6 - All Media Types
Genre: Flash Fiction, Gen, M/M, Unresolved Ending, identity crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-14 22:24:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14145876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jasminemelt/pseuds/jasminemelt
Summary: It can’t be helped. When you climb bodies in your dreams every night, they’re bound to catch up with you in the daytime.





	it can't be helped

**Author's Note:**

> Rewatched the show, and had to slough off some feelings.

It can’t be helped. When you climb bodies in your dreams every night, they’re bound to catch up with you in the daytime. Boundaries vanish. Shion didn’t know that when the walls that contained No. 6 came crumbling down, his thoughts would fling out from their carefully spooled reels as well. There’s a lot to a person’s head, he realized in the first few weeks after Nezumi’s farewell.

When he saw his mother kneeling in front of a grave for a person named Yoming, Shion realized that he didn’t understand a lot about his mother. Perhaps the most unnerving thing about the incident was her face expression. Shion would have understood sorrow, anger, or regret. But his mother’s face was indecipherable. Her lips set, her eyes narrowed, her brows furrowed. Even with these cues, her mental state was insurmountable. Shion wanted to empathize, thought he could empathize, but he knew he couldn’t. His mother was grieving, perhaps, a man he didn’t know, a man who meant enough for her to pause in the cemetery and bow her head. When she stood up, she wiped a stray tear away, and still, Shion felt that his mother, in her entirety, was incomprehensible.

Sometimes, when he talks to Inukashi, he wants to ask him about that night when he pressed his head against Shion’s chest and cried. Are you really a – ? But it’s a silly question, an unimportant question, and even though he wants to know, and his natural curiosity sometimes compels his lips to shape the first few words, he diverts at the last second and says something else, or nothing at all. Inukashi is perceptive, and notices his hesitance, but he never asks after it. Brash Inukashi, who charges into fights and is never afraid to speak his mind, holds back. Again, Inukashi, in Inukashi’s entirety, is unknowable. 

He wonders if Nezumi is, in fact, unknowable as well. Whenever Shion’s thoughts go tumbling down this direction, he feels as if his heart will tear apart – their physical distance, compounded by the distance he feels in his heart. It is excruciating.

When did it begin? The bodies. Crawling out of wells, shriveling in the lawns, peering at him from behind doorframes. And as suddenly as they appear, just long enough to frighten Shion to his toes, they dissolve into the aether.

Safu occupies his dreams too. She flits in and out, laughing sometimes as he struggles to find hold of an arm that isn’t still wriggling, calling his name sternly when he steps on someone’s skull and the cartilage of their nose cracks under his heel. She was never cruel in real life, but in his dreams, she is terrifying. His guilt haunts him.

“Shion. Shion. Shion. Shion.”

After a while, Shion wakes up with the sense that his name no longer belongs to him anymore. Who is he, really, beyond the consonants and vowels of his name, beyond the flesh and muscle twisted up into his physical form, beyond even thoughts and feelings and actions? The composite of Shion – is it a positive or negative entity? Is he Shion, or is he just not Safu, not Inukashi, not Rikiga, not his mother, not Nezumi?

He isn’t Nezumi. An obvious fact, inherent in everything Shion already knows about their relationship, but did he really know? No dark hair, no dark eyes, no quick wit, no sarcastic smile. No hand cupping his jaw, no dance partner guiding him step by step. Even if Shion were to find someone with all of these characteristics, they would not be Nezumi, because even Nezumi was not Nezumi without a Shion to say he was not.

Maybe that’s why he left. To find himself anew.

Maybe it began when Shion pulled the trigger to the second bullet that killed the man in the correctional facility. It was then that he realized he was capable of malice that went beyond good and bad, that crossed into a zone of morality that he wished he had never entered. Nezumi’s blood, Nezumi’s tears. He drowned in them in his darkest nightmares.

Maybe more than anything, Shion wants to see his favorite person again lying in bed, reading a book until his arms got tired and he decided to give up so he could sink into the couch next to Shion, leaning over to see what he was reading.

Karan, the younger one, likes to visit his mother’s bakery with her brother. From time to time, she wears the sweater Safu’s grandmother had originally knitted for him. The siblings don’t need him to read to them anymore, but sometimes, Shion offers, because a part of him likes to reminisce about his days living in West Block, when Nezumi was by his side.


End file.
